Link-Diversity Routing: A Robust Routing Paradigm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We present link-diversity routing, a routing paradigm that achieves high path resilience in mobile ad hoc networks. Link-diversity routing chooses each hop of a packet's route, so that the choice reflects the amount of outgoing links towards the destination at the intermediate hops. This choice maximizes the opportunities to make progress at every hop in the presence of unpredictable link failures caused by mobility or fading effects. As a result, link diversity routing takes paths which are less prone to fail due to individual link failures than traditional routing. We develop a loop-free and distributed link-diversity routing algorithm. The algorithm is based on an analogy from the heat theory which consists of routing packets along the steepest gradient of a temperature field. We perform simulations of our algorithm with a DSDV-based implementation. Our simulations show that link-diversity routing increases the end-to-end packet delivery ratio to a factor of up to four without any additional protocol overhead compared to the traditional minimum hop- count based DSDV.